Way too much of a mediocre thing

by Luigi Guarino on April 5, 2013

This post may just be too meta for most busy readers, but I just had to get the sequence right in my head, so apologies, and feel free to go and make a cup of coffee or watch the Svalbard video again instead of reading any further.

And there it rested, and arguably should have stayed. But then, on 27 March, SciDevNet did a story on that first Science paper, pretty much out of the blue, even highlighting the fact that it was a month old. In my opinion, it really didn’t add much to the NPR story, though it did link to another, earlier and much narrower, study by the paper’s lead author, the wonderfully named Lucas Garibaldi.

Which brings us to Mongabay. Normally totally on the ball, they waited until 3 April to publish their take on Garibaldi’s original Science paper. And really, to be honest, again they added very little to what NPR had said. Or indeed to the paper’s title, for that matter.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Garibaldi et al.’s paper is interesting and deserved a write-up. But three largely overlapping write-ups over the course of a month after publication? Well, you tell me. I know what I think.

Featured Comment May 23, 2016

Åsmund Bjørnstad is not at all daunted by the doubters on the need to reform patents:

First, I entirely agree that “global legal harmonization” is a daunting task… [But] [g]iven that four countries has passed breeding exceptions for patents, that Switzerland adds compulsory licensing to this, and the emergence of private licensing consortia, changes need not be dramatic.